Bitcoin [BTC]: Andreas Antonopoulos breaks down life cycle of a transaction on the BTC blockchain

2019-04-20

Bitcoin [BTC] and its intricacies have been a concept that many users in the cryptoverse have been trying to understand since its inception. In his latest video, Andreas Antonopoulos, a major Bitcoin bull and the author of Mastering Bitcoin, elucidated on the life cycle of a wallet transaction from start to finish.

Antonopoulos stated that from the point someone sends a transaction from a wallet to its confirmation on the Bitcoin blockchain, the wallet constructs a transaction by accumulating the BTC in the user’s wallet and assigning the addresses. The user’s wallet then transmits the transaction’s information to one of the many nodes it is connected to, from where it can be sent to ‘1, 2 or even 8 other nodes’. He added:

“The transaction is then transmitted to other nodes, which can be mining nodes, e-commerce payment gateways, and many such options. Each of those nodes will receive the transaction from your node and each of those, in turn, will validate every single transaction. When the nodes receive the transactions, they don’t’ know whether it was created by you or was forwarded and hence each of these transactions need to be validated individually.”

Antonopoulos went on to state that if all the nodes are validated, ie. if the payment details are correct and if it is confirmed that no double spend has occurred on the blockchain, then eventually through the process of ‘flood propagation’, the transaction information will be sent to every other node, out of which some may be mining nodes. In his words:

“Once the transaction reaches the mining pool, it maintains a pool of unconfirmed transactions, like a bucket where all this unconfirmed data is stored. This is the pool known as the mempool. Also, know that there isn’t THE mempool rather there is ‘A’ mempool. Information in separate mempools can be in a 99 percent overlap but there will never be a case where it will completely similar.”

According to the author, the mempool also serves the purpose of providing transaction for a miner to add a new block after which ‘the race is on’ for the next block. Miners usually have to construct a block and then solve the Proof of Work on it to eventually make it a confirmed block. Antonopoulos claimed that once the block is made, the information will be sent to the mining equipment to solve the PoW on that particular block and probably after a “billion hashes” the miners will find the block. The Bitcoin bull elucidated on the information transfer back by saying:

“Once the PoW is solved, the mining node will propagate the node back the same way as it received. The nodes validate the block on the way back and once all the nodes confirm its validity, then the user’s wallet will know that there is a confirmation on the transaction. That is the entire life cycle of a transaction.”